New Product Discovery

Hopefully, this is not a controversial statement: product discovery is one of the first things you do when working on a new product. Yet while people agree you should do product discovery, there are differing views on how you should approach it. And there will be some folks - who should know better - who think they can build a new product without discovery. Read on to find out how some experienced product people practice discovery, even if they didn’t start out doing it.

6 Product discovery methods you’ll need as a product manager. Product discovery is a huge and often overlooked part of a product manager’s day-to-day job. Product managers, and anyone wanting to become a product manager, handle a sizeable chunk of any business: keeping the product useful, relevant, and ahead of the competition. The key to such success? A healthy product discovery process. Janna Bastow explains what that looks like, including product discovery methods and the tools that will help you along the way.

(via ProdPad )

Discovery is not a process. It’s pretty common for people who are new to product development to think that product discovery is a process, but we need to understand that’s incorrect. Product discovery is a set of tools to help us mitigate the risks of product development. Joca Torres explains that product development teams are a big part of your company’s costs. You need to be sure that you’re investing their time in developing things that help the company reach its objectives while addressing your customer’s needs.

(via Joaquim Torres (Joca) )

Product discovery: A practical guide for product teams. Tim Herbig shows you how to go beyond cliché advice, like “just talk to users more often,” to make sure the practice of Product Discovery helps teams to make real progress.These are the exact techniques that he uses to help Product Teams around the globe navigate the uncertain problem space of their user segments and identify solutions that are worth building through evidence-informed prioritization and testing.

(Via Tim Herbig )

Product discovery is a waste. That’s what Jay Melone told himself in order to avoid discovery for a new product he’s building for New Haircut. Contrary to the discovery methods he teaches his clients, he skipped discovery and jumped right to solution mode. He thought he knew what to build… That it would be faster to build first, and measure and iterate after. Outcome: Build Trap. He wasted 12 weeks, built the wrong thing, and had to start over. To help you avoid the same mistake, Jay describes the 5 indispensable discovery methods he’s using this time around.

(Via New Haircut )

5 Stages of product discovery: From idea to reality. Product management is a discipline that focuses on taking on a problem with solutions that aren’t real (product vision) putting together a short-term bridge (product strategy) and bringing together ideas that make that bridge a reality. Turning that bridge into reality is the work of product discovery. Adam Thomas looks at the stages of product discovery. These stages can vary based on the environment that you are in but, overall, you can put them in five buckets - ideation, research,? prototyping, production, launch, and marketing.?

(via airfocus )

Do you like what you see?

If you like what you're reading, go to ProductCollective.com and subscribe. That way, you can get this newsletter in your inbox every Friday before everyone else.

Product Management News: Week of May 29, 2023

No ChatGPT in my court. Texas federal judge Brantley Starr added a requirement that any attorney appearing in his court must attest that “no portion of the filing was drafted by generative artificial intelligence,” or if it was, that it was checked “by a human being.” He put that requirement in place because of the news about a filing from attorney Steven Schwartz that he wrote with the aid of ChatGPT. The filing had six cases and a relevant precedent - all of which were complete hallucinations from the language model. Does that make the filing unprecedented?

For evaluation does not mean use in production. Nutanix, a cloud-computing software and services provider, said an internal investigation into its misuse of third-party software—software intended for evaluation and available at no cost—has resulted in $11 million in estimated payouts to the vendors involved. Apparently “individual departments” inside Nutanix used software that was intended only for evaluation for business purposes. To make matters worse, some employees intentionally concealed their actions to at least one vendor. Now is a good time to make sure you’re not using any evaluation copies of software in production.

Microsoft seeks a US agency for AI governance. In a blog post, Microsoft laid out a five-step blueprint for public governance of AI that includes implementing government-led AI safety frameworks at the inception level and identifying content generated by AI. Take this as a sign that big tech looked at the spotty history of self regulation and asked someone else to do it. Given the timeliness of tech regulation in the United States, this may be an attempt at plausible deniability.

With all these tech layoffs, is anyone hiring? InformationWeek analyzed data from an assortment of job boards and Indeed.com’s list of companies hiring tech workers. They found that many other industries are still hiring tech professionals, such as financial services, aerospace and defense, management consulting, pharmaceuticals, insurance, healthcare, automotive, higher education, and retail. The trick is whether these enterprises can convince people used to working in tech companies that working in tech-enabled businesses can be as fun and rewarding.